- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy - Benjamin Franklin
Google plans to take on Amazon
GOOGLE IS PLANNING to launch an e-book store called Google Editions next year to compete with Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
The company said that the store would sell platform agnostic e-books and would open in the first half of next year with a catalogue of around 400,000 to 600,000 titles. Google said it didn't see the store as aimed at e-book readers but at anyone with a browser and an Internet connection.
“It will be a browser-based access," Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program, told Associated Press.
"The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view."
The company indicated that the books would not be purchased and downloaded as with conventional e-book readers, but instead stored in a “cloud library.”
Google will be trying three different business models with the store. In the first it sells the book directly and takes a 37 per cent cut, or sell through the publisher or retailer with a different commission plan.
The Association of American Publishers, estimates that the e-book market in the US is worth $113 million, and is growing at 68 per cent a year. µ
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Sounds like a solid business model, and perhaps will increase acceptance of electronic books. I don't see a financial downside to electronic books, they reduce waste both via reduction in paper materials as well as the energy and environmental delivery costs. This could benefit both retailer and consumer.
That having been said, I see reluctance from the crowd that feels uneasy not having their purchased materials stored locally, they may be afraid that the books could be deleted, taken away, or worse, censored without their approval. We have already seen this happen, with Amazon and the Kindle/Orwell fiasco.
I also see reluctance from the crowd that likes to read their materials from paper. Maybe if these books were printable, or even partially printable. Using this cloud storage, how would one read their books on an airplane, or any place without internet access for that matter? A suggestion would be to allow transfer to an iPhone or Android phone for remote use, but cloud-only storage?
We'll see.
There is all this talk about 3G and e-book readers... why does my e-book need a 3G access if i have a 3G phone. that doesn't make any sense to me.
i am not so familiar with the new wifi stuff but if they replace the bluetooth standard wouldn't wifi be totally enough?
i would prefer to see google work together with plastic logic personally
"why does my e-book need a 3G access if i have a 3G phone. that doesn't make any sense to me."
Because there's other people out there and some of them don't have 3G phones?
"i am not so familiar with the new wifi stuff but if they replace the bluetooth standard wouldn't wifi be totally enough?"
??
I prefer Project Gutenberg, thanks. Prices are more in line with what I'm willing to pay.
Hey check out all the old Tom Swift books from childhood days:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/a#a267
I also prefer archive.org for old movies and texts, that are also available at my preferred price point. Hey check out the original "Google Beta" web page from Dec 1998:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/
A subscription &/ library service and a soft leather bound OLED reader (newspaper style) with touch-screen controlling capability.
Free with a subscription to the WSJ, etc.
Or maybe an OLED hankie would blow.
I wish they'd try and take them on as Amazon.com and not just be another player in a pre-failed eBook market. I love Amazon.com for buying stuff, and most of the purchases are not book. More competition in that realm would be great, but in eBooks? Meh, what a waste.